So BBC Three is relaunching. It's officially becoming the Two Pints Of Lager And A Packets Of Crisps Channel. (It isn't. Hopefully it's trying to become anything but that.)

Hell, they might have a bunch of new shows, but you wouldn't guess it. With the relaunch of a whole channel, all people want to talk about is the death of the talking blobs, who are being replaced with something pretty, but a bit bland.

There will be programming, of course, and many one-off dramas and things that may turn out to be great (and thanks to The Stage TV Blog for their handy breakdown of some of the more drama-ish bits). But much of the focus of the relaunch, according to channel controller Danny Cohen, will be on 'multi-platform' and 'interactive' ideas, which, for some reason, sends a nasty shiver down my spine.

These two statements from Cohen are particularly worrying:

We're going to place innovative, interactive ideas at the heart of our key programmes. The forthcoming show [Lily Allen and Friends] is a really good example of that. It's based around social networking, and it's a really good example of the kind of things we want to put around all our key shows.

We're also going to produce online content with the passion and production values you would normally associate with television. Later this week we're going to launch an online project called Upstaged. It's a really innovative mix of talent show, social networking and stamina. It's going to be online for the first five weeks and then it's going to have a joined-up television show for its final three weeks.

You'll notice that he uses the phrase "social networking" twice, which frankly, is twice too many times when discussing TV.

What on earth does it mean? Applying the principles of Facebook and MySpace and all those things to the format of the show, presumably. But what will that mean, in practice? Will there be little status messages running along the bottom of the screen? "Lily Allen ... is singing a song", "Lily Allen ... has lost her thread but hopes it'll come back soon!", or "Lily Allen and Alan Carr are now friends!" every time she interviews someone?

Does it mean she'll be interviewing them on the basis of internet memes, asking them a bunch of meaningless questions in order to ascertain which character from Friends they might have been, at which point she'll present them with a little badge that they can display on the sidebar of their own tv show reading 'I'm Monica!', with a cheap screengrab of Courtney Cox Arquette? Are they going to allow viewers to Skype in with video comments that, on such a high profile show, will mainly involve people shouting "FIRST!" at the camera, and having nothing more interesting to add?

I can understand that it's important at this juncture to make television that works with and on the internet, but I can't stand the whole desperate rush to try and amalgamate the two.

The things that work in text and in surfing, in short attention bursts or when the whole world is only a click away, are not the same things that work on a static box in the corner of the room. It's like me being asked, as a blogger, to go on TV and talk about current affairs - as if my position on whether cheese sandwiches are better or worse than kittens could possibly inform intelligent people about the latest financial market mayhem. While what I do works on the internet (mostly), there is absolutely no reason to believe that it should work on television.

The very things that allow people to interact on the net are the things that television cannot reproduce; the option of anonymity, free speech, shared language, peer support and the popularity of the talented or genuinely original rather than the chosen. Television has all its own strengths that it can feed into the internet. Why does it think it has to keep borrowing to succeed?